Yay blogs. A place where you can rant as much as you want about anything. Even if nobody willl ever read it, unless I link it to my signature. Which I don't think I'll do in a long time, at least until signatures are fixed.
Anyway, I just came up with an insightful topic, so I want to share my thoughts about it with the world: Wii is the crappiest console made by Nintendo. Ah wait I can't say bad stuff about Wii in a Wii forum. Moving on...
Ever since I sang We Will Rock you at a Christmas festival when I was 8, I've been very fond of singing. My voice got all tough and badass a few years later
but as cool as that is it meant no singing; at least I can't sing the stuff I like, like Blink-182 or Mayday Parade. Because of this I've always had this "I love singing but I suck at it" complex, and when I heard that Guitar Hero (one of my favorite games) was going to have vocals, I went crazy! Still I never actually got the microphone...
[yt]9yCFFD2O7Ik[/yt]
I've heard my neighbors sing this in their showers. Oh wait I sing that... but not in the shower... yeah.
Which brought me to dowloading UltraStar, a free karaoke game for PCs, to see if videogame singing was my thing.
[yt]PEmifHYcKPM[/yt]
This guy probably sings better than I do
I was disappointed to see how the display worked: you get the phrase you have to sing, and a line with the pitch, but the game doesn't show which word/syllabe goes in which pitch. There's no way to know which part goes where, which can cause confusion if the song if the vocals suddenly speed up or slow down. "But that's ok if you know the song", you might say. Well sure, but a nice thing about music games is not only to play your favorite songs, but to hear new ones. Being able to sing songs without knowing them should be important in music games...
Then I thought that UltraStar looked like that because it was free and stuff; but after some researching, I found out that most karaoke games work like that. Not trying to offend people that like it this way, but it feelt to me like every singing game developer out there was too lazy to make songs accesible to anyone, only letting people that know the song enjoy it. That is, until I saw this:
[yt]Rj6QqMFHfq8[/yt]
This video is titled "Weezer "My Name is Jonas", Expert Vocals Sightread"; the Sightread part means he was singing it for the first time in the game. Sure, it's an easy song, and he probably heard it elsewhere before: but the game provides all the tools to sing it, even if he had never heard it. Yes I'm talking about the scrolling vocals, which, unlike most karaokes, show the speed and pitch of each individual segment as opposed to overall phrases. This system allows anyone to sing any song without knowing it. Sure, singing an unknown song for the first time would probably sound crappy, but the point of these games is to have a fun time and sing well along the way, not the other way around (unless you want to seriously sing and just use games to practice... in which case I guess UltraStar and similar games should do)
So in few words, Guitar Hero/Rock Band rock, everything else sucks; I'm off to buy a mic and sing the s**t out of Green Day and Gorillaz in Easy. Have a nice day.
Anyway, I just came up with an insightful topic, so I want to share my thoughts about it with the world: Wii is the crappiest console made by Nintendo. Ah wait I can't say bad stuff about Wii in a Wii forum. Moving on...
Ever since I sang We Will Rock you at a Christmas festival when I was 8, I've been very fond of singing. My voice got all tough and badass a few years later
but as cool as that is it meant no singing; at least I can't sing the stuff I like, like Blink-182 or Mayday Parade. Because of this I've always had this "I love singing but I suck at it" complex, and when I heard that Guitar Hero (one of my favorite games) was going to have vocals, I went crazy! Still I never actually got the microphone...[yt]9yCFFD2O7Ik[/yt]
I've heard my neighbors sing this in their showers. Oh wait I sing that... but not in the shower... yeah.
Which brought me to dowloading UltraStar, a free karaoke game for PCs, to see if videogame singing was my thing.
[yt]PEmifHYcKPM[/yt]
This guy probably sings better than I do
I was disappointed to see how the display worked: you get the phrase you have to sing, and a line with the pitch, but the game doesn't show which word/syllabe goes in which pitch. There's no way to know which part goes where, which can cause confusion if the song if the vocals suddenly speed up or slow down. "But that's ok if you know the song", you might say. Well sure, but a nice thing about music games is not only to play your favorite songs, but to hear new ones. Being able to sing songs without knowing them should be important in music games...
Then I thought that UltraStar looked like that because it was free and stuff; but after some researching, I found out that most karaoke games work like that. Not trying to offend people that like it this way, but it feelt to me like every singing game developer out there was too lazy to make songs accesible to anyone, only letting people that know the song enjoy it. That is, until I saw this:
[yt]Rj6QqMFHfq8[/yt]
This video is titled "Weezer "My Name is Jonas", Expert Vocals Sightread"; the Sightread part means he was singing it for the first time in the game. Sure, it's an easy song, and he probably heard it elsewhere before: but the game provides all the tools to sing it, even if he had never heard it. Yes I'm talking about the scrolling vocals, which, unlike most karaokes, show the speed and pitch of each individual segment as opposed to overall phrases. This system allows anyone to sing any song without knowing it. Sure, singing an unknown song for the first time would probably sound crappy, but the point of these games is to have a fun time and sing well along the way, not the other way around (unless you want to seriously sing and just use games to practice... in which case I guess UltraStar and similar games should do)
So in few words, Guitar Hero/Rock Band rock, everything else sucks; I'm off to buy a mic and sing the s**t out of Green Day and Gorillaz in Easy. Have a nice day.
